Word: museum
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...despite the mountain of literature, films and photographs documenting the Holocaust, Desbois has filled in a crucial missing piece of history by interviewing hundreds of people who witnessed the Ukrainian killings firsthand. "The testimony is just unbelievable," says Paul Shapiro, director of research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is honoring Desbois at a dinner in the capital in April. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish-rights organization in Los Angeles, is awarding Desbois a Medal of Valor in May. The center's international director, Shimon Samuels, says Desbois' findings might even cast doubt on the long...
...years, Holocaust researchers have relied heavily on accounts from Jewish survivors, and on official German and Soviet archives; about 16 million pages of Soviet reports are now housed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. But Desbois has taken Holocaust research in a new direction. As he sees it, his work is more like "a police investigation," in which he tracks down eye witnesses, cross-checks their stories, and hunts for graves and bullet shells. The resulting voices of hundreds of witnesses provide a window into how a well-organized genocide could occur in these Ukrainian communities with no one choosing...
Saving Beauty Looking like a cross between a very disorganized museum and the world's most expensive rummage sale, the vault at the OCBC's Paris headquarters is filled with stolen art that the team has recovered in recent months. Items from churches - including statues, lecterns, wooden pews, and bronze busts that belong in the Père-Lachaise cemetery - are packed on shelves, stacked against the walls and spread across the floor. Alongside them are hundreds of pieces taken from museums, galleries, libraries, archaeological sites and private homes: paintings by Renoir and Courbet, sculptures by Rodin, lamps...
...That anything is left at all is in large part due to the efforts of museum director Omar Khan Massoudi, his staff, and a small group of concerned archeologists and politicians. In 1988, they secretly moved the highlights of the collection to a vault in the Central Bank at the presidential palace. Massoudi, who risked his life to preserve his country's cultural heritage, was one of seven men who had keys to the vault. All seven keys were needed to open it, so by spreading them around and keeping their locations secret (in case of death, a key reverted...
...wasn't until 2003, more than a year after the overthrow of the Taliban, that the Afghan government confirmed the existence of the treasures and restoration work began. Less than one-quarter of the museum's original collection survived. Afghanistan is still deemed too unstable for the art to go home, and the museum itself remains badly damaged. So currently this traveling exhibit is the only way Afghans can see the museum's collection. Curators hope the exhibit will go home in the not too distant future, but for now, it will continue making its rounds abroad...